[h2]Background:[/h2]
During my time on FP, I've noticed that there's a pretty large group of members who are interested in, if not enthusiasts of, space exploration, travel, and science. Space is one of my passions, and I think it's about damn time that FP had a thread dedicated to talk of, and information about space.

[h2]FAQ:[/h2]Q: Why the shitfucking nippleballs should I care about space?

A: Well, what an eloquently formed and entirely understandable question!
There are a number of reasons that you should care about space. It has the possibility to provide untold amounts of resources for the human race, is a great place to perform research and to develop new products, or to manufacture things that can't be easily built on Earth. It also provides a frontier for mankind to explore, even just here in our own solar system. Fields that feed into space science are also a large producer of jobs, with corporations like SpaceX, Bigelow Aerospace, Virgin Galactic, and of course the governmental space agencies providing dozens of manufacturing and engineering jobs. Not to mention research positions in fields like astronomy and astrophysics.

Q: When has anything useful come out of space?

A: Well, a lot of things, actually! Digital cameras, flat screens, advances in medicine and manufacturing, GPS, and much more!

Q: What's going on in space exploration and research today?

A: Well, NASA recently cancelled the Space Shuttle program, and that was a major hit to the industry. But recently the private sector, mainly in the form of SpaceX, has made huge advances in putting their products into space, and SpaceX is soon to be the first private company to ever dock with the ISS!

[h2]History:[/h2]
A few key points that would be good to be aware of for discussion are:
October 4, 1957 - Sputnik 1 is launched, becoming the world's first artificial satellite.
November 3, 1957 - Sputnik 2 is launched, carrying the first living being, Laika the dog, into space.
January 31, 1958 - Explorer 1 is launched, becoming the first American satellite.
April 12, 1961 - Vostok 1 carries the first human into space, Yuri Gagarin.
May 5, 1961 - Mercury 3 carries Alan Shepard into space, becoming the first American to orbit the Earth.
December 21, 1968 - Apollo 8 launches, it will carry the first humans to leave Earth orbit and travel to the moon and back.
July 16, 1969 - Apollo 11 is launched, landing the first humans on the Moon.
April 12, 1981 - The Space Shuttle is launched for the first time.
January 28, 1986 - Space Shuttle Challenger disintegrates during launch due to an O-ring failure on the right SRB.
April 24, 1990 - The Hubble Space Telescope is launched into orbit aboard the orbiter Discovery.
February 1, 2003 - Space Shuttle Columbia breaks apart during reentry into the atmosphere, with all hands lost.
September 28, 2008 - SpaceX's Falcon 1 spacecraft makes it's first successful flight.
June 4, 2010 - SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft aboard their Falcon 9 rocket becomes the first commercial spacecraft to make a complete orbit and reenter successfully.
July 8, 2011 - The Space Shuttle Atlantis lifts off on STS-135, the final Shuttle mission to be flown.
May 25, 2012 - SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft becomes the first commercial spacecraft to rendezvous and dock with the ISS.
August 5/6, 2012 - NASA's Mars Science Laboratory and the Curiosity rover land on Mars.

A good timeline for the space race:

And of course, it wouldn't be a space thread without pretty images:Hubble Ultra Deep Field:

While it's a shame that it was shut down, I think it was time we moved on to more fruitful endeavors (no shuttle pun intended), but I do think they should have had their next program in mind as they cancelled the shuttle, rather than scrapping Constellation and now on to SLS.

Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space, listen...

I've always had an interest in space but it's been growing lately. Particularly I'm interested in how to get around space at any sort of reasonable speed. Does anyone know of some books that deal with propulsion in depth?

Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space, listen...

I've always had an interest in space but it's been growing lately. Particularly I'm interested in how to get around space at any sort of reasonable speed. Does anyone know of some books that deal with propulsion in depth?

If you've ever seen any interview with him though, he seems the least smug it's possible for any human to be, and he always seems really nervous when doing speeches and interviews, which is starting to become part of his character now.

Space threads in Sensationalist Headlines are usually hilarious by the way, because there are so many people who don't understand how shit works, like the thread about the ISS going to be killed off in a few years by burning it up in the atmosphere, and some people asked why we didn't just give it a slight nudge which would apparently push it either straight into space or into the moon, because there's obviously no gravity in space

I'm planning on studying physics/astrophysics when I get to university. Been interested in space since I was old enough to be interested in something. Also just going to share a handy-ish site which is pretty much a less fancy version of Stellarium if you get an account there.

Space threads in Sensationalist Headlines are usually hilarious by the way, because there are so many people who don't understand how shit works, like the thread about the ISS going to be killed off in a few years by burning it up in the atmosphere, and some people asked why we didn't just give it a slight nudge which would apparently push it either straight into space or into the moon, because there's obviously no gravity in space

Man, people keep saying that the iss should be refurbished into a moon base, but to get there it would require a crazy amount of fuel to change the orbital inclination to match the moons orbit, then you would have to preform a transfer orbit, and even if you do manage to pull both of those things off, you would still have to land 25'000 pounds on the lunar surface. Even if you just put it into lunar orbit you would have to have rockets to transfer the supplies to it. It's way to crazy to turn the iss into a moon base, in matter of fact building a base from scratch might be easier.